The Abolition Of Man (No, Really)

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title “The Limits of Diversity”.

Conor begins by laying out his own openness to diverse experience. Then he imagines, as an intellectual exercise, someone who is totally closed to experiencing different things. He says that his “bubble may be thickest” precisely here: in trying to see the world through the eyes of those who are highly closed to diversity.

(Nota bene: the standard narrative in our culture is to stigmatized those who are closed to diversity, but that is the normative human experience. Besides which, as we often talk about on this blog, progressives who take pride in their supposed openness to diversity can be some of the most closed-minded people you’ll ever meet. They just draw their lines in different places.)

Conor says that listening to a recent podcast, he came hard up against the borders of what he would consider acceptable diversity. He writes:

Its main subject, bio-artist Adam Zaretsky, is not one of these authoritarians. Rather, he is a member of my tribe, a “libertarian,” Stenner’s term for those who prize individualism, diversity, and difference. And he is the first person to evoke in me a gut desire for enforced sameness and suppressed diversity––a visceral reaction I cannot recall having before.

That’s pretty strong. But read on, and it’s very easy to see why:

At the edge of science, researchers are using a newfound ability to edit any gene to work toward wonders: sustainable biofuels, ridding the world of malaria, seeking cures for genetic diseases. Trans-genesis, the process of taking a gene from one organism, cutting it out, and pasting it into another, has advanced radically, with new precision that will revolutionize medicine. It could give rise to genetically enhanced soldiers or astronauts; it may allow whole nations to increase their IQs.

Its aesthetic ramifications are less discussed. Consider the embryos that Adam Zaretsky has tweaked in the course of his bio-art projects and the art classes he teaches. “To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double-bind in people’s minds,” he said. “They’re like, ‘It’s not a sculpture, it’s a being, or growing to be a being.’ What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans, or non-humans, is a somewhat invasive act, but also based on a particular aesthetic, at a particular time, in a particular state of mind.”

Never mind curing Alzheimer’s or understanding the universe.

“I’m not here to cure anything or make knowledge. I’m here to make enigma,” he said. “I’m trying to problematize the concept and de-science it so people can see it for what it is.”

Let that sink in. He is not bringing new forms of human life into existence for aesthetic reasons; he’s working on animal embryos. But if you read the transcript of the podcast you’ll see that he’s looking forward to working on humans. Excerpt:

Transgenesis is taking one gene from one organism, cutting it out and pasting it into another organism. Now, we are reaching a point where we’re getting better at the potential for making transgenic humans, genetically modified humans, humans that are GMOs.

First of all, let me just say this – transgenic human embryos are already being made. They’re not necessarily being grown full-term, but this is something that’s possible. It’s been possible to do this since the ’70s, but people have been saying “I don’t know… No one would actually do that! That would be psychotic” because the technique that was how to target the genes into the human genome without them falling anywhere or everywhere, so it lands willy-nilly in the genome and can cause all kinds of problems, like cancer or death. But there’s a new way to get genes into the human genome that isn’t as disruptive as before. CRISPR/Cas9 has made the news as a technique that’s more refined, it’s more targeted, exactly where your gene is gonna land, so we could just use it to knock in or knock out problematic genes or ad genes, and so it won’t harm the rest of the organism.

It’s a fairly easy to use technology, and it’s available in do-it-yourself CRISPR kits already for yeast, for worms, but not necessarily on human cells. It’s not perfected yet, but on the world scene there are different laws in different nations, and I have to say this is one of those standard Pandora things – if you can do it and it’s been 50 years, it’s about to be released that people ARE doing it because they HAVE been doing it.

Later, he says:

It’s been a goal of mine for more than ten years to make transgenic humans. I do have problems with the process, I do have problems with the results, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do it if I could.

Just so you know what kind of sick monster Adam Zaretsky is, here he is describing himself and his background:

I think I wanted to be a banker, a pornographer and a communist. It’s hard to mix all those three, but I’m on my way. I’m already a pornographer and a communist, so I think I just have to go to business school.

Somewhere between science fiction and sado-masochism is an aesthetic based on prurient interest. It’s alright. It’s alright. Sexuality shouldn’t just be about flowers and a glass of wine and some smooth music and some loving sex. I actually love dropping cotton balls on someone who’s tied up – that’s fine, but there’s something raw and rancorous, and there’s something camp, and there’s something trans, and there’s something transvestism, and there’s something transgenic. They’re all sort of flowing together under the aegis of basically queerness.

Let’s just face it, okay? I’m a child of Rocky Horror, I’m a child of Soft Cell. I really like luring disco dollies to a life of vice.

You guys are just uncovering every little thing about me, this is so nice. It’s nice to study myself like a specimen!

“All sort of flowing together under the aegis of basically queerness.” Do you understand what’s being said here, reader? He reminisces about being in New York as a young man, and seeing the performance artist Karen Finley do her infamous routine where she shoved yams up her rear end. He remembers being enthralled by Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait shoving a whip handle up his butt. More Zaretsky:

And some people refer to shock art in a way to dismiss it, when actually art that shocks is achieving an aesthetic goal. The goal is to make you revulsed; the goal is to make you dismiss or repress the art, but also the goal is to crack through your resistance, your screen, and show you what’s underneath. It’s not always pretty, but this idea that you’re allowed to bullshit-detect rational culture and go ahead and be honest without it being like a situation comedy that ends in a moral, happy ending… I felt a little freer, to go ahead and do the work of the negative. It actually matters.

Desensitizing people to the perverted, the radically abnormal, the … evil. This is what he’s into. More:

To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double bind in people’s minds, where they’re like “Oh, it’s not a sculpture, it’s a being” or “It’s growing to be a being.” What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans or transgenic non-humans is a somewhat invasive act, but is also based on a particular aesthetic at a particular state of time in a particular state of mind. I’m trying to problematize the process, and sort of de-science it a little bit so that people can see it for what it is.

He believes in creating mutants for the sake of art. Just because he can. As an expression of the artist’s will. Here’s the world Adam Zaretsky foresees:

I think that it’s important to make versions of transgenic human anatomy that are not based on idealism. I wanna make sure that there’s plaid kids, all the other queer anatomy out there to compete with the other add-ons that parents are gonna be paying for. To get bio-queer transgenic humans is going to save a lot of difference on the planet. It’s gonna stop us from monoculturing ourselves and it’s gonna also offer a real and possibly unacceptable face of the democratization of the human genome.
The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose and an ostrich anus. That makes for bodily difference and surely metabolic differences etc, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that’s based on collage. It’s literally gene collage.

What’s weird about it is that once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce and you’ll have children born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses.

Children born with ostrich anuses. That’s what this man dreams of. A sane society would forbid his work and throw him in prison if he got anywhere near a lab. But this mad scientist-artist ison the faculty at MIT, and teaches at has taught or been affiliated with other prestigious universities.

The point here is not to evaluate sanctity as a moral intuition, never mind to defend every application of it. The point, rather, is to remember that sanctity is a powerful driver of moral intuition for many, and that lots of Americans who aren’t particularly prone to disgust would, when confronted with antlered, aardvark-tongued babies, agree with Leon Kass.

“Repugnance,” he once wrote, “revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.”

Insofar as the power of those intuitions is forgotten or dismissed by liberals, or libertarians, or difference loving peoples, or transgressive artists understandably alarmed by the prospect of “perfect” designer babies, the result is as likely to be a horrific backlash against diversity and neophilia as a future in which they face no limits.

I will tell you this. I would eagerly vote for a leader who promised to put Adam Zaretsky and his kind in prison, and close their labs. These are lines that must not be crossed.

But I also tell you this: our society will never do this. If it is okay to manipulate human genes to protect someone from disease, why not to provide them with enhanced abilities? And, having established that there is nothing sacred about human genes, who’s to put a limit on what the Adam Zaretskys of the world choose to do with them?

If you convince people that we must tolerate Adam Zaretsky’s children with ostrich anuses for the sake of curing childhood disease, or helping them to have their dream baby, they’ll accept it. That’s how we are. We Americans figure out what we want, then come up with the rationalization later. Zaretsky is right that if the technology exists, people somewhere are going to do whatever they want to with it. I can’t argue with that. But if this evil is going to come into the world, let it not be through my country. That’s my belief. I would accept severe restrictions on liberty to stop that evil.

Also, notice how Zaretsky accurately points out the role transgressive art plays in desensitizing us and making us willing to accept ever more transgressive acts as normative. It’s true not just of transgressive art, but transgression itself. Look at this image of the two covers National Geographic ran this month:

The one on the left, featuring a nine-year-old transgender boy-girl, went to subscribers. The other was for newsstands. Apparently the magazine’s editors realize that there are still plenty of people who find the idea of a prepubescent child presenting as the opposite sex disturbing. The editor of the magazine described this child as “brave,” which gives you an idea of the editorial slant of its presentation of transgenderism.

You can hardly get more establishmentarian than National Geographic. This is the future. Adam Zaretsky is right: “everything is sort of flowing together under the aegis of basic queerness” (and by “queerness” he means most broadly the overturning of all values and distinctions). Many of the most intelligent and powerful people in this culture are deliberately destroying the categories of man and woman, and calling it virtue.

When I call the Benedict Option “a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation” (the subtitle of my forthcoming book), I’m not talking about preserving our political views. I’m talking most fundamentally about preserving basic humanity and sanity through this coming darkness.

I shake my head at my fellow conservative Christians who think the danger has passed because Donald Trump is president. One of Trump’s big backers is the Silicon Valley transhumanist Peter Thiel. If you think there’s anything within Donald Trump that will stand against the technological exploitation of human life, you’re dreaming. The Democratic Party won’t oppose it because they see Science as sacrosanct. Plus, the philosophical principles they accept to justify abortion lays the basic groundwork.

As for the Republicans, if you think the sanctity of life will cause them to stand against transhumanism, ask yourself how far a proposal to outlaw IVF would get in Congress. It’s a procedure which has created and continues to create millions of human embryos that have been, or will have to be, destroyed (here are the numbers for the UK; ours are certainly worse, given our larger population). Isn’t it wrong to compare IVF to Zaretsky’s evil folly? No. Once the principle is established that human life can be deliberately created, knowing it will be destroyed in embryo, we’re only talking about details.

“the fact that a significant number people were willing to vote for him and hand him victory as essentially an act of rebellion from the status quo arc towards more of all the above, despite his severe failings otherwise, shows that a populist rebellion is brewing against the elite intelligentsia.”

Almost, Fran. The reality is that a rebellion is being fostered against intellect.

Someone asked about reactions when IVF was introduced. There wasn’t much, because probably everyone thought it was a variant of artificial conception, which has been accepted forever, it seems. The Catholic Church, which opposed the latter, came out with a logically consistent condemnation of the former. But that was about it. As I’ve said before, you wouldn’t think that IVF often involves the “sacrifice” of surplus embryos, because no anti-abortionist ever raises the point. But then, only the well-off can take advantage of the procedure , like the daughter-in-law of a very prominent Republican I know who sacrificed three.

So, no, there wasn’t any significant reaction. But it is also true that we now have a whole generation in early adulthood who were the product of IVF or who had single mothers and turkey baster fathers. But we have not seen any stats showing that these cohorts are turning out badly. And, in my case, I know several such who aren’t. I’m not being snarky–personally I don’t see how anyone raises a child without a father (m) and mother (f) or how any woman goes through all the folderol IVF requires.

“If it is okay to manipulate human genes to protect someone from disease, why not to provide them with enhanced abilities?”

Is a middle ground possible? For you, I mean. I get that you are against the ostrich anus. But let’s say a doctor told you tomorrow your kid is going blind. But the doctor can splice gene A and gene B and save his vision.

Do you turn down that treatment? Would accepting it make you complicit in the ostrich anus?

I thought conservatives agreed that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

At some point you become comfortable with hypocrisy and you wield raw power to outlaw things because you and 51 percent of people think they are gross.

Is a middle ground possible? For you, I mean. I get that you are against the ostrich anus. But let’s say a doctor told you tomorrow your kid is going blind. But the doctor can splice gene A and gene B and save his vision. Do you turn down that treatment? Would accepting it make you complicit in the ostrich anus? I thought conservatives agreed that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Yes. And at least there’s one good in shock art — it forces the controversy to come out into the open, so people can debate it rationally, and define it in moral terms. Draw where the lines should be, and where they shouldn’t be.

It doesn’t mean the person doing the shocking is right or moral though. Often he isn’t. Though people like Zaretsky, who hold nothing sacred and always wish to transgress, will always define moral objections as a kind of rationalization.

And I don’t think we need someone like Zaretsky. There’s already plenty written on the ethics of genetic manipulation without someone messing around with embryos. The idea that we need to materialize every disturbed idea in the name of “art” is ridiculous, as is Zaretsky’s weird notion that scientists were already doing “art” by putting ears on the back of mice. I mean, aside from compromised moral sensibility, there’s also his compromised metaphysical sensibility. Yea, this is where the road of “everything is art” leads. To a weird understanding that scientists were inadvertently doing art.

Dr. Frankstein meet bio-artist Adam Zaretsky. What a nut. Zaretsky talk of creating grotesque, mutant human embryos is plainly evil,and something that needs to be stopped including jail time, if necessary. He isn’t a doctor or scientific researcher so I guess he can’t be sanctioned by a professional association, but he at least shouldn’t be teaching our young people that is for sure. There seriously should be laws in this country in this country against this and some sort UN Convention globally as well. Very scary glimpse of some of the possibles of the future, and why religious conservatives really need to be active engaging the new technology and how some of these parties are trying to use every new “advance” to create societal–and in this case species–revolution. How many people are talking about this stuff from our vantage point? Your one of the few!

Regarding Trump, I think you are being way too pessimistic. I could see his administration advocating legal bans on what Zaretsky is proposing. Thiel’s influence and political importance isn’t comparable to that of the Christian and prolife communities on Trump (who it is said is a born again Christian) and I am not sure Thiel is actually all that radical in this particular area as implied by your link (it’s a hatchet job article).

All that said, once we accept IVF there aren’t many ethical barriers left. That’s why the use of IVF by lesbian couples has gone down without a murmur. If straight couples can use IVF, then it’s legitimate for anyone, goes the reasoning. That reasoning seems to be sound.

Indeed. A California fertility doctor murmured against performing IVF for a lesbian couple and was successfully sued by them. Another law besides that other one, (“it won’t happen and when it does you bigots will deserve it” is the one that says “What is Not Expressly Forbidden Becomes Mandatory.”

I don’t get people complaining about how National Geographic has “recently” gone off the rails, it has been a hard-left mess of misanthropy and pessimism since at least the 1990s. Nat Geo loathes humans, unless you are a Maoist guerilla or the FARC. Most people don’t pick up on it because they don’t read the articles, just look at the pictures.

Apologies for the nitpick, but “normative” and “normal” are not synonyms. Being closed to diversity may be the normal human experience, but it’s hard to see how it could be normative, or even what “normative experience” could logically refer to.

I only bring it up because “normative” is one of those words that pseudo-intellectuals abuse to make their statements sound heavier than they really are, and they almost always just mean “normal,” just like “modality” always means “mode” and “problematic” is self-descriptive. I don’t want writers I respect to start sounding that way.

The sad thing is that this seems to be the flipside of the alt-Right’s ironic racism. (ironic transgeneticism?) His snarky, let-me-deconstruct-myself-so-you-don’t-have-to approach to the interview reminds me of what Sartre had to say about Nazis in his own day, which of course resembles the alt-right of our own:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.” (Anti-Semite and Jew, 1944)

Rod, you’ve mentioned that many Trump-voters were driven to their choice by PC overreach. I’m still undecided as to what extent I agree with this. But as we look ahead to 8 years of Trump’s administration (potentially, and very plausibly), we can only hope that pornographer-cum-Communist-cum-businessman Zaretsky doesn’t become emblematic of a corollary backlash on the Left. Then Yeat’s “Second Coming” will truly be fulfilled as prophecy. To tweak FDR, we have nothing to fear but polarization itself.

But let’s say a doctor told you tomorrow your kid is going blind. But the doctor can splice gene A and gene B and save his vision. Do you turn down that treatment?

Of course not. Its a treatment. It cures a disease.

But according to this post Rod would. And – more importantly – is arguing that others should not only let their children go blind in this example, but that they should be barred from having access to that cure by the government.

And those of us who are infertile are left to wonder why God allows this man and others of his ilk to simply be about their business, while our own humble, run-of-the-mill efforts at babymaking are continually thwarted.

The Catholic church has always opposed IVF. Experimentation like this is difficult to prevent once your society agrees to delink the creation of human life from its evolved location in the loving embrace of its mom and dad, and, once you redefine human embryos as “nothing but balls of cells”. (What do people think the rest of us are made up of, magic dust? we are also made up of cells, people.).

I don’t think most scientists are ok with this kind of craziness. Scientists are people too, you know? They don’t generally want to create children with beaks or hoofs. They just want to cure disease. On the other hand, I do agree that a willingness to cross various moral lines with the rationalisation that it will help humanity in this or that way, also opens doors to bad actors.

But according to this post Rod would. And – more importantly – is arguing that others should not only let their children go blind in this example, but that they should be barred from having access to that cure by the government.

Rod can allow his son to go blind when a cure is available… no, maybe his son should have recourse to the courts, even as a minor. That’s a pretty serious thing to do to your child in the name of personal or religious liberty, even if your are the parent.

When Baylor or Notre Dame gives their first scholarship to a 7-foot 400 lb linebacker created with gorilla DNA, opposition to this will vanish.

Opposition to “this” is quite strong, and the circumstance you pose would likely increase it, not diminish it. Its not hard to distinguish between engineering and curing disease. Those who want to deliberately blur the distinction fall into two main camps: those who think its cool, and those who want to raise the alarm against cures by conflating them with engineering.

I think one of the biggest obstacles to this becoming widespread, or at least endorsed by the Left, is that if gene therapy could ensure that children would not be born homosexual or transgender, the overwhelming majority of parents would choose that.

Though I would expect National Geographic or Vanity Fair to do a cover story on the one outlier set of parents who would choose to have a homosexual or transgendet child.

In the heart of anthropos* is the desire to become a god, or at least god-like in power and glory.

Orthodox Christianity does not deny this instinct, nor does it condemn it as pride or foolishness, rather Orthodoxy represents the true and narrow path that leads to deification.

For a world that rejects both Orthodoxy and Christianity, the desire for deification does not go away, it simply becomes directed into technological and politically utopian paths for becoming gods. It is not the desire to become a god, but the desire to become a god without and against the Son (rather than by and through the Son) that represents the sin of Pride, as well as the so-called Faustian impulse of the West.

However, it is forgotten that the paradigm for this impulse choose to reign over hell rather than submit to Heaven, and these paths will only lead to the establishment of a living hell on Earth.

The world is a paradise, everything has been supplied for humans to live out their days in bonds of love and in peace. Yet we are never satisfied no matter how much we are given, and especially when more is given to our neighbors. Human societies as human bodies have certain human limits, and the desire to transcend those limits is a rejection of the gift of that particular role that God gave us to play in the great story of existence.

The Catholic church has always opposed IVF. Experimentation like this is difficult to prevent once your society agrees to delink the creation of human life from its evolved location in the loving embrace of its mom and dad, and, once you redefine human embryos as “nothing but balls of cells”. (What do people think the rest of us are made up of, magic dust? we are also made up of cells, people.).

I love this analysis about balls of cells; I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before. But yes, the Catholic Church has always been very very clear about this topic. Even artificial insemination with the husband’s sperm is forbidden.

The objection I’ve heard to this on the left (many years ago) assumed that, by the time we figured out genetic engineering of humans, we’d also figure out the genetic basis of personality, allowing both individual control freaks and organizations (such as governments) to splice in docility. This is actually more worrisome to me than the likes of Adam Zaretsky. Fantasies like the ones he describes will never have more than a tiny number of victims, but the craving for servants who are unthinkingly obedient and blindly loyal could transform whole nations.

It is not the desire to become a god, but the desire to become a god without and against the Son (rather than by and through the Son) that represents the sin of Pride

That sounds almost Mormon.

I think one of the biggest obstacles to this becoming widespread, or at least endorsed by the Left, is that if gene therapy could ensure that children would not be born homosexual or transgender, the overwhelming majority of parents would choose that.

There is no choice that technology can put in our hands that will not be used by some humans in a manner that other humans disagree with. I recall sometimes back Geoff G opined that if there were an intaruterine cure for homosexuality, he might well consider it a good thing, given how much pain being gay has caused him. Real life is more complex than any ideology can fully comprehend.

I think a lot of this stuff will be very marginal and, thus, will not have much impact on society as a whole.

However, I will say it for the really slow learners. Aging is a disease. Nothing less and nothing more. I will say it again for the really, really slow learners. Aging is a disease, no different than any other disease. There is no more argument for not curing aging than there would be for not curing cancer or heart disease.

Transhumanism is simply a 64 dollar word that describes routine medicine in the future.

Thank you for this post. I know it’s not your main focus here, but too often IVF (like divorce) gets ignored in the mainstream culture wars. Connecting the dots from that procedure to outright genetic manipulation is like leaving breadcrumbs pointing us back to our own roots rather than the consumerist products and technologies we create. So again, thank you. It marks an important common ground between religious conservatives and ardent naturalists, who may or may not also be religious (and vice versa). We will need each other.

I’m always interested in where lines are drawn, though. If scientific research can prove that a mother’s consuming XYZ during pregnancy will give her baby a higher chance of a high IQ, is it OK for her to seek out and then follow that advice? Is it moral to fund research on topics such as these? And is the moral question more to do with the allocation of research dollars, or with the pride and vanity that would be at the root of choosing to consume XYZ for the sole purpose of making your kid smart? More attractive?

What if a steady supply of XYZ is far more accessible to the wealthy than it is to the poor? Too bad, so sad? Church intervention? Gov’t intervention?

And then the does the whole thing get flipped on its head when instead of “higher chance of high IQ” is replaced with “lower chance of XYZ cancer/[insert ailment]”?

And does it matter, morally speaking, whether XYZ is naturally occurring (e.g. a food) versus synthetically developed (e.g. a pharmaceutical)? Where does that line get drawn? What about GMOs?

Buckle up, y’all. I don’t posit the above as a likely scenario, just as an example that (I hope) helps give shape to the overall argument(s) at hand. These issues will ramify in ways that at present, we can only hope and try to imagine.

And then the does the whole thing get flipped on its head when instead of “higher chance of high IQ” is replaced with “lower chance of XYZ cancer/[insert ailment]”?

Well, we routinely condemn mothers who drink or abuse drugs while pregnant, given demonstrated correlations between that and medical issues with the developing fetus. And plenty of people are more than happy to try all sorts of folk techniques (from dietary recommendations, to playing Mozart to the fetus through speakers placed on Mom’s abdomen) that are held to cause improvements (even if not substantiated by modern medical research).

But these things are a far cry from genetic engineering of human gametes, of course.

There is no more argument for not curing aging than there would be for not curing cancer or heart disease.

You must not have ever read the folk tales about the man who tricked death into a barrel and then plugged the whole, leading to some centuries in which nobody died, and the older people got, the more they complained about it. Eventually someone unstoppered the bottle, and death made up for lost time.

Before you blithely pontificate that old age is a disease, you should offer a credible definition of “disease,” explain the basis or source of your definition, and then show how “old age” fits this definition.